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Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

"Trust the science" hasn't made people more rational, it has made "science" more dogmatic. I wonder what governments and the media will latch onto once they have eroded the trust in science, because there aren't many other trustworthy institutions left.

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TBH, I think "Trust the science" is often used as a euphemism for "Trust authority", which isn't always good advice.

Also, the science itself doesn't really work as advertised. There is this book titled "Betrayers of Truth" [1] which I reluctantly recommend on that. The authors are sometimes a bit too harsh (e.g. about Millikan), but I think they have a point overall.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayers_of_the_Truth

When politics is mixed with any other field, that field generally becomes a subfield of politics - not the other way round.

Much like mixing garbage into food. You get garbage, not food.

Don't trust the people that report the science though.

The gutter press has to sensationalise stories to sell the newspapers and get viewers. It's a race to the bottom. A quarter not vaccinated!!! vs 75% vaccinated so far. Guess which one they run with? Let's not forget cherry-picking the science too, and that the media is a massive echo chamber.

There's no problem with science, but like any other industry, it has its own language, which isn't accessible to the average person, so someone has to simplify it. Journalists should not be that 'someone'.

I agree, but I still consider it a step up to what we had before. There's always been institutions whom people are told to trust. For a thousand years it was the church. I think for most people to trust credentialed scientists from government institutions is a vast step up, even if they have sorely disappointed during this pandemic.

You mean the people who told us not to wear masks? I trust science, but that doesn't mean I trust every scientist.

If you really trusted science, you would trust that information and knowledge is dynamic and they don’t always have the right answer at the beginning, just an answer that gets changed over time as more knowledge pours in.

I’m guessing you prefer your scientists to be absolutely right at the beginning right?

Anthony Fauci has explicitly admitted on camera that the reason "masks don't work" was promoted to the public initially was to conserve PPE for the highest-risk health workers [0]. It was NOT a case of the science changing:

> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

But they explicitly told us that at the time: “don’t rush out and buy masks, we don’t have enough for healthcare workers as it is, you don’t need them more than they do.”

The right just took some sound bites and excerpted the rest of the discussion to “prove” that Fauci was lying, while everyone else was rolling their eyes, and still are.

People hear the things that support the story they want to believe, and then ignore everything else that doesn’t support their preferred narrative. You don’t need a PhD in psych to realize that.

that's not how i remember it.

I think you are being a tad too generous here. That wasn't the explicit messaging. Public health officials and experts did in fact lie and palter in that case. Part of the messaging was explicitly "masks are not effective in preventing general public from catching COIVD" [1] You could reasonably see it as a "noble lie", however.

The whole thing is also complicated by the fact that science on surgical masks etc. wasn't (and isn't) that clear. During the 2009 H1N1 flu, CDC also recommended against face masks for ordinary people. See this SSC article for more on that. [2]

[1] e.g. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-don...

[2]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... (Scott, like you, is also sometimes a bit too generous :-))

Well technically, that's correct. Most masks that are typically worn are not very effective at preventing the wearer from catching Covid. They are effective at reducing forward transmission. The exception is proper sealed n95 or other filtering mask, and those require training to use properly, as well as being in short supply.

The problem often is that some people assume that scientists are priests in a religion called science.

That's a humbling point. Thank you.

"Trust the science" I think has been corrupted a bit in an Orwellian way by the likes of

>Dr. Fauci On GOP Criticism: ‘Attacks On Me, Quite Frankly, Are Attacks On Science’

whereas I'm more into

Feynman: The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'.

War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Fauci Is Science.

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